2024-08-14 Web applications
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For my own peace of mind, I have resolved to no longer think of
websites as "websites". Instead, there are web documents and web
applications. I find it easier to accept to use a browser like
Firefox like a virtual computer for web applications. Many of the
websites these days are in fact web applications.

There's no point in railing against web applications. I like to write
web applications! And I use many of them myself, too. Things like Face
Generator, Text Mapper or Hex Describe are impossible to do as
documents. In an emergency, you could have a form that then generates
a PDF to download, maybe? But is that really preferable? I don't think
so.

And don't get me started on writing native graphical user-interface
applications. It takes so much energy to get it right. It gives me a
headache. I tried. Take a look at Gridmapper with Common Lisp and SDL2
, if you want. Compare it with regular Gridmapper. Is that really
preferable? I don't think so.

And the reverse is also not cool. I wrote a text user interface tool
to generate maps, which can then be downloaded as SVG files. Give Hex
Populate a try, it works over SSH. Is that really preferable? I don't
think so.

I've tried Gemtext for a long time. I was very much into Gemini. But
these days I no longer think it's the answer. It's like a piece of
performance art: the doing of it is a statement. People who step into
it are confounded, their beliefs challenged. It's good art! It's
interesting technology. But it's not a replacement for web
applications. It's not even a good format for web documents! I want
inline emphasis – bold, italics, code – and accessible tables with
captions and cell navigation, and row-spans, and column-spans. I tried
writing code that translated Wikipedia tables into ASCII tables to be
used as pre-formatted text in Gemtext. It's hard to do well with the
sizing of columns, the line wrapping in cells, the limited space
available in a terminal, and when you've solved all of that, it's
still hell for people with bad eye-sight or cognitive problems trying
to understand what they're seeing. It's terrible. You could of course
do away with all tables. But is that really preferable? I don't think
so.

And so… there's that bifurcation in the road. For this site, for most
of the pages that I think of as web documents, I write (or generate)
HTML that doesn't require fonts or scripts. If one uses browsers such
as eww, links2, w3m, lynx or dillo, it should just work. I wasn't
going to convert the corporate web, anyway.

I still serve my site as Gemini and Gopher. But I do it as a political
statement, as a piece of performance art.

At the same time, I swallow my pride and setup Firefox.

⁂

I still wish we would all push for a web that does not require a lot
of resources.

> Nearly all growth in smartphone sales volume since the mid '10s
> occured in the 'budget' and 'low-end' categories. … if portals fail
> to work well on phones, smartphone-dependent folks are predictably
> excluded … Framework-based, "full-stack" development is now the
> default in Silicon Valley, but should obviously be avoided in
> universal services. – Reckoning: Part 1 – The Landscape

​#Web #Gemini ​#Gemini